The present invention generally relates to the field of measuring online viewership and more specifically to authenticating users.
Online audience measurements have a variety of applications in the field of Internet advertising and information consumption, including the determination of the audience of specific online media such as a website, video, article, blog, advertisement, file offered for download, etc. For example, advertising entities desire to know the number of unique visitors associated with a specific ad associated with a specific item of online media. Non-advertising entities desire to know the number of unique visitors associated with the media they provide. Advertising entities can leverage an accurate audience measurement to “get what they pay for” and non-advertising entities can leverage the same accurate audience measurement to market their popularity to the advertising entities.
In television and print media outlets, established statistical methods exist for measuring audience size. Online entities measure audience size by estimating the number of unique machines visiting a given web site on a given day. While this method suffices for generic traffic measurements over short intervals, conducting an accurate census of the number of actual humans (legitimate users) that constitute unique visitors frequenting any given online media over time is a much harder task. Some impediments to conducting an accurate census are, for example, individual users with multiple accounts for the same website and users with a variety of personal devices that access the same website from various locations. Other impediments include nefarious users that may create automated programs to generate large number of fake user accounts, fake interactions or hijack other users' systems and direct them to a webpage to inflate the number of unique visitors. Nefarious users may use many methods to commit fraud or otherwise negatively impact the experiences and participation of legitimate users.